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UK Ousts France as 5th Global Economy

Britain has overtaken France to become the world’s fifth-largest economy - and will even outstrip Germany by 2030, according to a new analysis by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), Scotsman reported.

As Britain’s economy is growing considerably faster than France’s, CEBR economists expect the UK to pull further ahead rapidly in the years to come, even though recent GDP data showed the economy has not been growing as rapidly as previously estimated.

The UK’s nominal GDP is forecast to expand to $2.92 trillion in 2019, versus $2.67 trillion in France.

France, which posted record unemployment levels this week, is slipping into a deflation-recession spiral along with the rest of the Eurozone. Japan has been afflicted by a similar economic environment that has afflicted the country for two decades.

The latest edition of Cebr Global’s World Economic League Table (WELT) shows China’s growth continuing so strongly that it is now predicted to overhaul the US as the world’s biggest economy by 2025 - compared with 2028 last year.

Cebr Global predicts that Germany will slide back economically, due to its declining population and the likely weakness of the euro, to the extent that Britain will overtake it in 2030 for the first time since 1954 - when the comparison was with West Germany alone.

But if Germany left the euro, the group forecasts that its currency strength would mean that the UK would be unlikely to overtake it until around 2050, by which point Britain’s superior demographics would prove “irresistible”. If Scotland were to leave the UK, Germany would still be well ahead in GDP terms by this point.

The report’s 2014 ranking puts the US first, followed by China, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Brazil, Italy, India and Russia, in that order.

By 2030, it forecasts that globalization will have reached its mature phase, with China installed as the world’s biggest economy ahead of the US and India in third place, followed by Japan, Brazil, the UK, Germany, South Korea, France and Russia.

Cebr chief executive Douglas McWilliams said: “The fun of the world economic league table is that it brings things back to hard figures. Countries like Russia and Argentina, who have invaded neighboring countries and whose leaders spout aggressively nationalistic rhetoric, are brought down to earth by their falls in the league table as their economies collapse.

“The World Economic League table also shows the dramatic changes now taking place in the world’s economic geography with slow-growing European economies falling back and Asian economies, even though their growth is slowing, catching up.